WITH reference to Richard III, some points need clarifying about this much-maligned monarch.

Richard became King in 1483 and his title was endorsed by Parliament. He therefore had no need to have the princes killed. The consensus is that the skeleton be re-interred in Leicester Cathedral. However, before his accession, he had always maintained his wish that he buried in York Minster.

The situation altered when he became King; his wife, Anne Neville, is buried in Westminster Abbey, and as a reigning monarch (should he have lived out his normal span) that is where Richard would have been interred alongside his ancestors.

This is where it all gets murky. Henry Tudor was a devious chap with everything to lose; he played dirty. Tudor’s claim to the throne was tenuous. He predated his reign to the day before the battle of Bosworth, thus making Richard the usurper and Henry the legitimate monarch.

A clever move but necessary from Henry’s point of view in that it made all the Yorkists traitors and thereby more likely to come to terms with the new regime; it also made it easier for the Tudor propaganda machine to depict Richard as a usurping monster.

Before 1483 no ill was spoken about Richard. He ruled the north of England as his brother’s right hand man; he was loyal and well loved by the people of York. So we should let Richard rest in York Minster.

Anne Woodward, Upper Newborough Street, York.